Bog Myrtle & Peat

This is a fine place for skylarks. We always have three or four little birds singing over the yard all summer, and we walk beneath a web of others as we move towards the river and the rougher ground. We’d be lost without them, and their songs fill this old place with a chatty racket from February to August.

But dozens of larks have come to us this year. We are playing host to many more birds than previous years, and they’re just the latest to cash in on the oat stubble. I find them clustered in their dozens on the frayed old field and they rise like a wave of sparrows when the wind gathers them. The stubbles have become a tatty slop, and the cattle smear the soil into a choppy mess of spent seed, shit and black, thatchy straw. Wagtails and corn buntings have been delving through the remnants of our harvest for a fortnight, but now it belongs to larks and they know it.

The days are getting longer, and the larks are uneasy. There is only space for a few pairs, and the extra birds are making the field seem busy and small. Some of them want to stake out territories for the spring, but they’re still being raked by sleet and foul winds. It’s hard to think of breeding in three inches of slush, so they sulk in a quiet team during the bite of the day. But when the wind is still and the sun is almost warm, they rise up to battle and sing over the steaming cattle. I listen to the riot of two dozen larks in the blue husk of spring and I wonder how long this will last because there’s surely no space for all these birds to stay and breed here. I begin to assume that most will be driven away as territories are formed, and while the oat stubbles might make space for an extra pair or two this summer, but the real benefit has been to all those other birds who will move on to sing elsewhere this summer.

We’re deep in the “hungry gap”; that black trench of starvation which runs from February until the grass begins to grow. It’s a dank, hollow bottleneck when birds die and the surplus of autumn is planed away to the bones. But thanks to those oats, there’s a chance that these extra larks will survive and find somewhere new to be.  It’s another pounding reminder that wild birds are soon undone without agriculture, and the oats continue to pay their way six months after they were harvested.